By the end of 2024, there will be 5,709 public data centers worldwide—5,186 colocation sites and 523 hyperscale sites. Asia-Pacific has the highest concentration of data center locations, with Europe and North America following. ABI Research anticipates 8,378 data centers will be in operation by 2030.
As enterprises continue to digitally transform and leverage advanced technologies, demand for cloud resources and larger data centers has peaked. Although the number of data centers being built worldwide is growing, regional differences exist due to varying regulatory, legal, and space availability factors. Moreover, North America and Europe are already well-established markets for data center construction, leaving room for major growth in other regions.
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What Is a Data Center?
A data center is a facility built for housing and distributing huge sums of data. The data center has networking infrastructure, such as cooling systems and server racks, that allow third-party enterprises to rent space for computing and data storage needs. The public data center market is divided into two main categories, each experiencing different growth rates and influenced by distinct factors:
- Colocation Data Centers: This category includes any space within a building, owned or leased by a company, that is rented out to third parties for their networking equipment or server storage. Colocation data centers can host multiple companies within one physical building, offering either retail or wholesale space, or both.
- Hyperscale Data Centers: These are large-scale facilities that offer extensive space, power, cooling, and infrastructure to support massive data and cloud computing operations. Hyperscalers include companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM, and Oracle.
Number of Colocation Data Centers by Region, 2024-2030
By the end of 2024, there will be 5,186 colocation data centers worldwide. Growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.6%, the number of colocation data centers will increase to 7,640 by 2030.
Today, Asia-Pacific has the most data centers (1,811 sites) worldwide, followed by Europe (1,558 sites) and North America (1,357 sites). Some of the countries with the most data centers built in these regions include China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Canada, and France. By the decade's end, ABI Research anticipates Asia-Pacific (2,126 sites), Europe (2,108 sites), and North America (1,803 sites) to sustain the first, second, and third most colocation data center locations, respectively.
Number of Colocation Data Centers by Size, 2024-2030
The size of data centers is increasing, driven by the rapidly growing adoption of generative AI and other data-intensive technologies relying on the cloud. While the number of micro and small-sized data centers will decrease throughout the rest of the decade, the construction of large and mega data centers will grow robustly.
Today, large and mega-sized colocation facilities account for only 28% of total data centers worldwide. However, that number will grow to 43% by 2030 as companies build larger data centers that can accommodate AI/generative AI workloads and other data-hungry applications.
By 2030, the aggregate power capacity of large and mega-sized data centers will reach 142,682 Megawatts (MW) and 289,259 MW, respectively.
Hyperscale Data Centers on the Rise
Hyperscale data centers are large, remote facilities with greater cloud computing capacity than enterprise data centers. Cloud service providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM, Alibaba, and Oracle are investing billions of dollars in building data centers around the world. This will increase the number of hyperscale data centers from 523 in 2024 to 738 in 2030.
AWS has the most data center sites worldwide among all cloud hyperscalers, with 126 as of 2024. By 2030, that number will increase to 185. This gives AWS a market share of roughly 25%. Microsoft Azure and GCP will closely trail AWS through 2030 for the most amount of data centers built.
While North America and Europe remain innovation hubs for hyperscale data centers, Asia-Pacific is a faster-growing region. AWS and Google Cloud have announced their plans to build data centers in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand in the last couple of years. Microsoft currently operates a data center in India and plans to open new facilities in Taiwan and Indonesia.
Cloud hyperscalers have also taken a keen interest in South America and the Middle East & Africa. Although these regions are home to far fewer data centers than other regions, they will experience significant growth in facility construction throughout the decade. Saudi Arabia, with aspirations to become a tech hub in the Middle East, has piqued the curiosity of hyperscaler tech companies. For example, Saudi Arabia’s plans to become a manufacturing hub will necessitate expanding cloud resources. This growing appetite for cloud-based solutions will present a huge opportunity for data center owners and construction companies.
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For more information on where the best data center investment opportunities exist, the reader is referred to the following resources:
